


wanderer

by Mayarene Rose (Paradise_of_Mary_Jane)



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 14:37:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20602436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paradise_of_Mary_Jane/pseuds/Mayarene%20Rose
Summary: The wind sings in his ear, telling him when it's time to go.Dick Grayson was never meant to stay in one place for too long.





	wanderer

**Author's Note:**

> I was supposed to write prodigal. Ended up writing this instead. Story of my life istg

The first times he sneaks away were just about Tony Zucco, plain and simple. He needed to catch his parent’s killer and the guy definitely wouldn’t be hanging around on some manor on a hill. 

But Dick won’t lie and say it didn’t make him feel a bit better, too. It did. IIt made him feel a lot better. The manor was too old, too steady, too permanent. Dick didn’t belong there. He couldn’t quite make himself fit, not that he wanted to, either. Travelling was in his blood. It’s not like he was supposed to stay in one place like Bruce Wayne clearly intended to force him to do.

Sneaking out was the only option.

Being out and about in Gotham is a terrifying experience. Maybe it was his dad’s voice in the back of his head, or maybe it was the fact that he was all alone in the filthier side of the city past midnight, but he couldn’t help but jump at shadows. 

Everyone is a stranger. And not ones Dick particularly cares to know.

Still, he pushes on. Dick was four the first time he fell from a trapeze and into the safety of a net. He learned how to swallow his fear before he learned how to walk.

It happens over the course of a few weeks.

The city sunk into his bones like a recurring nightmare. He thinks about running sometimes, just packing up and leaving. It wouldn’t actually be that hard. Dick can take care of himself. He can probably track down the circus if he tried hard enough. He’d have to wait a while, of course, so the foster people won’t get suspicious, but he’s pretty sure they won’t turn him away a second time. The circus is a haven for runaways, after all.

He’d get to go back home; back with the people he loves and who love him back. 

But he can’t leave. Not yet. Not until he finds his parents’ killer. Not until he made them pay. 

It was harder than he thought it would be. Gotham was ruthless and cruel and unforgiving.The city did nothing to help him. It was doing its very best to kill him.

He understood why his dad hated Gotham so much.

Dick is eight and he longs for the day he sheds the skin of the horrid city for something kinder.

\--

Bruce finds him. Bruce saves him. Bruce stops him from doing something he’d probably regret for the rest of his life.

Bruce asks him to stay.

And Dick… Dick thinks about it.

He doesn’t know what it means to stay in one place, but he knows how to stay with the same people. His parents are gone and the circus left. He doesn’t have anyone else. He can go anywhere he likes, but that’s not the point. He doesn’t have anyone else.

Maybe staying with Bruce wouldn’t be so different. Places are just places. What difference does one make with the other?

Or maybe it would be a life Dick wouldn’t be able to live with. There’s no way to know, really.

Bruce wants to stay for him. But he also asks him to stay.

Dick promises to try. It’s all he can give. It seemed enough for Bruce at the time.

\--

Having Robin helps.

Robin made things easier. It gave him a reason to stay. It was a show he had to put on every night and well, they usually settled down for shows, didn’t they? Robin made the world make sense. Robin flies and Dick pretends that he gets to be other than where he is.

But Robin wasn’t enough. 

Dick is nine and ten and eleven and twelve and the wind is calling to him. He goes to other cities. Makes friends with other heroes. They set up a clubhouse. They couldn’t quite agree where to put it at first. They had one in the forest, one in a city, and one near the ocean. Dick didn’t think there was anything strange about how they kept moving around, but it was driving everyone else on edge.

They eventually chose the one close to the sea, for Garth’s sake, but Dick made sure the others are still fully-functional. Just in case they changed their mind.

They never did. They were happy to stay in one place. To have a place all their own.

Dick puts a smile on his face and pretends he was perfectly happy too.

\--

Dick was always going to leave. It was just the way things are. It was just the way he was. It’s not that he was running away, but sometimes places stop being homes. Sometimes places stop being enough. They don’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. Just bits of earth and metal and stone. Sometimes, places can’t give him what he needs. 

It’s not anyone’s fault, but that’s the way it is. Things run out so you go somewhere else.

He thought Bruce understood that. He was a child and Bruce had saved him. Bruce understood him so well in the beginning that he made the mistake of thinking he understood everything.

Bruce didn’t understand. He was fundamentally different from Dick that way.

It broke Dick’s heart to remember that.

\--

Their clubhouse stood by the sea. Dick takes the time to learn how each grain of sand fits under the soles of his feet.

In the day, they spend a lot of time fighting with each other. In the evening, they spend most of their time just being in each other’s company.

They lie down on the sand, side by side, listening to the constant murmur of the sea. They look at the stars. They have their own stories about them. Donna talks about gods and Roy about painted stones up in the sky. Dick tried to tell the ones he remembered but it was hard. He doesn’t remember any of it well. And it’s harder, thinking of the way he can’t quite remember his mother’s voice anymore.

Garth doesn’t really have stories about the sky so he told them about the sea, instead. Whispers its secrets to them, things no other surface dweller knows.

Dick falls asleep to that with a peaceful smile on his face. 

\--

Bruce never really understood. He didn’t have the wind in his blood. He got angry, when the time for Dick to leave drew close. He got possessive. He lashed out. 

Dick didn’t really know how to explain, how to make him understand. Bruce is the most permanent person he knows. His family had built Gotham. He’s shaped his entire identity around the city. It’s carved into his bones and mixed in with his blood.

Dick goes where the wind tells him. It’s the only way he knows how to live. 

Dick can’t stay. Staying makes no sense to him. Places are just places. Bits of land. Bits of stories that he’s never really part of. Sometimes it accepts him and sometimes it doesn’t. Still, he knows he has to leave because one place couldn’t possibly hold everything he needs.

Sometimes he’ll need something else that one place doesn’t have and the other place does. He never really understood why people are always so terrified of leaving, as if getting left behind made them mean less. As if leaving meant there was no going back.

Moving on is part of life. 

Dick knows people rarely understand. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to explain himself.

He longs for his mother’s voice, that gentle lilt in her accent when she says his name. He wants to hear her again, say one more time,

_ “Come little Robin. Come. It’s time to fly away again.” _

\--

The sea calls to him.

The Teen Titans go everywhere together. New York and California and everything in between. Sometimes, they go to Europe. One time they went to France. They stopped by Marseilles and Dick shows them around.

“The circus stopped over here a lot when I was younger,” he said with a shrug when the others asked. He didn’t say,  _ I think my mom was born here because she spoke French with the same sing-song accent, but she never really talked about where she was from. _

_ “It doesn’t matter where you were born,” she always told him. “All that matters is where you are.” _

Sometimes, they even go to Atlantis. Sometimes to help out with some threat and sometimes just to visit. The Teen Titans go where the wind takes them, where they’re needed the most. If Dick closes his eyes, he almost thinks he’s home.

\--

Of course it all falls apart, eventually.

Things… Things settle down. 

Donna tried explaining it to him, once, even though he never asked. She was nice like that.

“We can’t just keep flitting from place to place like little kids,” she says. “We can’t just keep doing what we want. Everyone has to grow up eventually.”

Dick thought that settling down in one place and growing up. 

Donna’s smile is gentle. 

“There’s a lot of things I will never understand about Man’s World,” she says. “But we have to live here, don’t we? We live the best way we can.”

“I know,” Dick says.

“This isn’t the end,” she says.

Dick nods. It doesn’t make the empty loss in his heart go away.

\--

Dick is sixteen and he wanders through the streets of New York. Bruce wanted him to go to college so he did, but he spent most of his time in the city trying to know it instead of going to his classes. It was different from Gotham. Younger, somehow. More frantic, if that was possible. 

He tries to find a new place to know. A new home to be in. He tries to find people but there’s not much to be found in a city that moves so fast.

His feet itch. The wind calls him and he can only stay for so long before it feels pointless to resist.

The Titans--new ones and old--come and save him from completely disappearing.

\--

That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt when Bruce eventually kicked him out. 

There’s a difference, see, between moving on and getting chased away. Dick’s gone through both, while living with a circus, and there’s a difference.

Dick leaves because that’s what you do when people don’t want you there anymore. It’s a special kind of hurt. Especially if it’s a place that grew on you without you noticing.

He leaves and he knows that even if he comes back, he won’t be able to look at the place the same way. 

It’ll always be the place that didn’t try to understand.

\--

Bludhaven is a compromise.

Not Gotham. A new city he can know. New people he can be with. Different enough to be almost unfamiliar. Not Gotham. Never Gotham. It was fundamentally different from Gotham. There were no clowns or talking crocodiles trying to destroy the city, just simple, hardened criminals. 

Bludhaven wasn’t Gotham but it was close enough that he can be in Gotham when he’s needed. Bruce needs him. He’s not risking not being there ever again. 

Bludhaven was his compromise.

Bludhaven was a disaster.

He leaves behind a place that’s more rubble than city. He leaves behind the bodies of people he knew and people he could have known.

He leaves and vows never to come back.

\--

He eventually goes back to New York because New York is familiar and he needed familiar. He needed a city that was mostly kind to him. Brooklyn this time, because it was a different world from Manhattan. He tells himself it’s different and it was. Things changed, and mostly for the better. For a moment, he actually felt at peace.

Then, Gotham calls him back. It calls him back to stay in a place he never really liked wearing the mantle of a man he wasn’t.

Dick can’t help but feel like that city really is cursed.

\--

Bruce coming back is a relief, in more ways than one.

Dick packs up and leave the first chance he gets. Or he would have, if he didn’t have someone trying to stop him.

“Why do you have to leave?” Damian asks, a week before he’s set to go.

And Dick doesn’t really know how to explain. It was Bruce because he can’t quite living in the same house as him ever since Jason died, and it was him, too. It’s not like he was ever able to stay in just one place.

“I can’t stay,” he says. And he doesn’t say,  _ I would if I could,  _ because it would be a lie, even though it’s clearly what Daman wants to hear. “It’s not--It’s not you but. I can’t stay.”

“It’s because of Father.” It wasn’t a question. Dick frowns. He doesn’t want to ruin a Father-son relationship before it even starts.

“It’s not him, either,” he says. “I just. I wasn’t meant to stay in one place, Damian.” And he’s not going to say he was born a wanderer, because it might not be true, but wandering all he’s ever known. It was how he was raised. It was the only way he could find himself.

“Stay, Grayson,” Damian says softly, sounding like the child he pretends he isn’t. “Stay for me.”

And, maybe it hurts a bit, too, leaving Damian behind. He’s grown to love the kid, after all. But Gotham is cursed and there are other places that aren’t. Gotham raised him but it doesn’t mean it can keep him.

Dick goes where the wind calls and the wind hasn’t called for Gotham for a long time now.

“Come with me, if you like,” he says. “Not permanently. You’d still have to live with your dad, but you can come with me sometimes.” Bruce is probably going to  _ hate  _ the idea, but Dick doesn’t care. He’s not going to force Damian to come with him, but he’s not going to stop him, either. 

He’s taught Damian to fall in line, but Robin always makes his own choices, in the end. Dick’s not going to take that away from him.

Damian frowns, looking thoughtful. Dick thinks he saw eagerness flash through the kid’s face, but he’s not gonna call him out on it.

“Where are you going?” Damian asks.

Dick grins, wider and more real than he’s made in a long time. “I don’t know yet.”

\--

Dick is thirty when he leaves Gotham again.

Damian is going to follow, though he didn’t say when. It’s not like it’s going to be hard. They have access to the best transporter technology in the galaxy. Though Dick wants to take him on a proper road trip at some point. For purely educational purposes, of course.

He has no idea where he’s going or what he’s supposed to do for the first time in what feels like a lifetime. The thought makes him smile.

The wind calls to him. The road is long and Dick is eager to see where it leads.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](https://acediscowlng.tumblr.com) if y'all want to chat :D
> 
> As always, your comments give me life <3


End file.
